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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What role does reception theory examine?
(a) The critic's role.
(b) The teacher's role.
(c) The author's role.
(d) The reader's role.

2. What is the name Edmund Husserl gave to his philosophical method?
(a) Phenomenology.
(b) Hermeneutics.
(c) Reception theory.
(d) New criticism.

3. According to Eagleton, when did the Russian formalists emerge?
(a) Before the Bolshevik Revolution.
(b) Before WWII.
(c) After WWI.
(d) During the Russian Revolution.

4. Eagleton argues that reading literature in a new critical way was a recipe for what?
(a) Political inertia.
(b) Political progress.
(c) Political ambition.
(d) Political consciousness.

5. What is the German word for how reality is not objective, but experienced and organized by an individual subject?
(a) Bildungsroman.
(b) Lebenswelt.
(c) Wendepunkt.
(d) Vorgeschichte.

6. What kind of analysis is phenomenology, according to Eagleton?
(a) Uncritical and discursive.
(b) Uncritical and non-evaluative.
(c) Critical and discursive.
(d) Discursive and non-evaluative.

7. According to Eagleton, "if one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English in the later nineteenth century" what would it be?
(a) The failure of government."
(b) The failure of religion.
(c) The success of government.
(d) The success of religion."

8. According to Eagleton, what is ironic about those who complain of the difficulty of literary theory?
(a) "That those who complain are often civilised and educated."
(b) "That those who complain would expect to understand a textbook of biology or chemical engineering."
(c) "That those who complain are often uncivilised and uneducated."
(d) "That those who complain would not expect to understand a textbook of biology or chemical engineering."

9. Eagleton's goal in "Literary Theory: An Introduction" is to provide a comprehensive account of literary theory for whom?
(a) Those who have specialised knowledge of literary theory.
(b) Those with extensive knowledge of literary theory.
(c) Those who have some knowledge of literary theory.
(d) Those with little knowledge of literary theory.

10. According to Eagleton, the "very meaning of _______, ________ and _________ has undergone deep alteration."
(a) Literature; reading; criticism.
(b) Art; theory; practise.
(c) Power; authority; freedom.
(d) Film; viewing; education.

11. According to Eagleton, what idea is "truly elitist" in literary studies?
(a) "The idea that literature can only be understood by writers of literature."
(b) "The idea that literature should not be read by those without a higher degree."
(c) "The idea that works of literature can only be appreciated by those with a particular sort of cultural breeding."
(d) "The idea that literature is the only way to understand a particular culture."

12. For the Romantics, why was their vision of a just society was inverted into a nostalgia for an old and "organic" England?
(a) Because they refused to give up their privilege as writers in industrial society.
(b) Because they lacked the means of transforming industrial capitalism.
(c) Because their vision of a just society was a corrupted version of industrial capitalism.
(d) Because they were revolutionaries who were imprisoned in the old system.

13. During the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the word prosaic begins to acquire what a kind of connotation?
(a) A familiar connotation.
(b) A positive connotation.
(c) A unfamiliar connotation.
(d) A negative connotation.

14. What is the name of the economist Eagleton discusses in his preface?
(a) Gordon Tuck.
(b) Adam Smith.
(c) I. Fischer.
(d) J. M. Keynes.

15. How many decades, according to Eagleton, has there been a "striking proliferation of literary theory" since the publication of the Russian formalist's pioneering essay?
(a) Two.
(b) One.
(c) Five.
(d) Six.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Eagleton, formalism is the application of what to the study of literature?

2. According to Eagleton, why is E.D. Hirsch able to maintain his view that literary meaning is absolute and resistant to historical change?

3. What person is NOT included in the ranks of Russian formalists?

4. According to Eagleton, eighteenth-century literature embodied more than social values, it also was an instrument for what?

5. According to Eagleton, what kind of age do we live in, where "meaning, like everything else, is expected to be instantly consumable"?

(see the answer keys)

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